John Hollinger is 4+ games closer than I am on the projections for Charlotte, Denver, Minnesota, New Orleans and Orlando. This is obviously sorting in my favor but if you just looked at the other 25 teams I'd be ahead of him. I am not surprised that I am not close on the first 4 teams, I don't claim to know them well. Orlando I was betting on a Howard trade disrupting or the trade talk disrupting. So far it hasn't.

I haven't really checked comprehensively but I haven't run into any. There wasn't much analysis from them about all of them finishing in the bottom half of WiLQs report on last season predictions. There was the off-season change in the defensive rebounding credit but no response to my suggestion to recalculate last season's performance if that change had already been implemented and apparently not much interest to re-engage in the prediction contest this season, despite people being previously told that metric performance is important to know and important to use in evaluating metrics. Instead a certain author choose to emphasize that short tests of metric power aren't that reliable or interesting.

Metric performance is (near?) impossible to compare going forward in time. Did you all use the same minute projections? Did Hollinger send his around? Crow has already said that he made his prediction for Orlando based on the idea that Howard would be gone at some point; I assume not everyone else did. If Hollinger then wins, does that mean PER is the best measure around or that he had better minute estimates (or used something else)? If Daniel ends up in last, will he stop using ASPM because it is obviously flawed? Making the predictions is a fun exercise, but I don't know how much knowledge you'll have gained at the end of the year.

Metric performance is (near?) impossible to compare going forward in time. Did you all use the same minute projections? Did Hollinger send his around? Crow has already said that he made his prediction for Orlando based on the idea that Howard would be gone at some point; I assume not everyone else did. If Hollinger then wins, does that mean PER is the best measure around or that he had better minute estimates (or used something else)? If Daniel ends up in last, will he stop using ASPM because it is obviously flawed? Making the predictions is a fun exercise, but I don't know how much knowledge you'll have gained at the end of the year.

Completely agree. For metric comparison we need to do retrodiction with actual minutes

The idea was floated to come up with minutes beforehand, but with rosters still taking shape -- not to mention rumors of players being traded, being lost overseas, etc -- this is fairly impractical.Perhaps others besides myself also included projection methods based on age, multi-year trends, etc. These would be separate from player ratings, but they've been mixed in.

Again, these standings are based on wins to date and point differential. If they included strength of schedule, past and future -- or if they were Pythagorean -- or both (!) -- they'd be different.We could all be the winner!

I wonder if a typical player might still peak in the 24-28 range, but he may be more adaptable to a better team after that time.In other words a LeBron or a Shaq might be more able to lead a team to titles when he's 24-28 years old; but his supporting cast might likely be older than NBA avg.

It may just be that hot young stars tend to want to have "their" team; and then with maturity they'd prefer to win a title -- manipulating their whereabouts to achieve this.That doesn't mean they became "better" after 28, but that their priorities changed.